Great timing, @LiseL!
The World Economic Forum released its Global Risks report today, and it's being reported around the rise of mis- and disinformation to our top concern for the next two years.
I of course go a bit deeper, and highlight some *very* troubling analysis in this report.
It's not just the bad data.
It's that we can't even necessarily trust our states to *want* the situation to change. We're in for a rough ride, while trying to tackle other issues today.
https://onlysky.media/mclark/false-information-our-top-global-risk-in-2024/
Malinformation
"...similarly twists accurate information out of context, distorting its importance to flood a news cycle with something other than accurate data that does not benefit one’s “side”."
That was one of the words I needed. I've been seeing a lot of that. What about purposeful *repetition* of information with the same intent of distorting the importance of an event to benefit one's "side"? Is that a kind of malinformation?
Repetition of data can definitely be a form of malinformation! Clinton's emails is a good example of that; it's not that the core issue was fake - but the way it was repeatedly driven back to the centre of the news cycle was a form of political distortion that crowded out other, often far more pressing data points. This happens often in the news, sadly.
Honestly, it seems kind of obvious, yet it's hard to constantly and consistently be ready to identify the lies, exaggerations, and omissions in order to protect oneself against being misled by them. It's relentless.
The hardest lesson I had to learn last year is that many of us *don't care* if something we see posted is distorted.
Quite the opposite: we're very good at recognizing when data is being given to us as a weapon to use against the "other side" - and then we'll wield that data like a hammer in service to our own.
We have to *want* data to be more than a weapon, if we're ever going to build a media climate more conducive to supporting an informed civic realm. But we're not there yet.
True. And no, obviously we're not.
I've been visiting Ground News daily...
They include some information on the bias of articles I find useful
They also judge the factuality of articles...
It's funny that the right biased stories never gets higher than mixed factuality...
@MLClark Truth is key. @LiseL